Difficile est tenere quae acceperis nisi exerceas

Ok, just forget the title for a second. I should actually start with some sort of explanation.

A couple of days ago I was browsing my girlfriend’s page on Pinterest and was swamped by a number of wedding invitations with this rustic look. I will be honest, it was a little surprising. Visions played in my head that she was either expecting me to pop the question or she was going to do it. This is the twenty-first century after all. And since we have been together for a couple of years I guess it wouldn’t be out of order.

The thing that made me the most curious though was that she had never expressed any interest. Not in the getting married part. We have discussed that. But rather the rustic wedding.

We’re your typical Seattle couple. Ok, that isn’t fair to say, if you would ask us we’re Seattle best couple. BUT, half of or friends would say that about themselves.

Rustic weddings? Yeah, we’ve been to one or two. They were nice, they were what the couple wanted, that is the point of a wedding after all, but that was about it. I never really imagined what my wedding would look like. I wouldn’t have said rustic or even country, even though I do own a couple of lumberjack shirts. Hey, if you live in Seattle they are almost mandatory. I’ve never worn the beard that is so popular right now. I am more the man bun type. Though I regress.

As I looked through the collection of invitations it became obvious that the whole rustic wedding was the focus here. There were all sorts of variations but the theme was clear. And honestly I am not sure how that made me feel. I had never really envisioned my wedding. But I guess I didn’t see it like this.

After my face regained a little color I decided that the best plan of action was to be honest, up front, and ask if we were planning our wedding.

I mean, I figured I had a right to know. Right?

That evening over supper I got up the courage and popped the question. Well, at least the question that was on my mind.

The look I got back was one that could only be described as a mixture of amusement and horror.

Now it isn’t like I was spying, I mean we talk all the time on Whatsapp and Snapchat so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Anyway, there we sat with this awkward silence in the air until we both broke out laughing. It was clear that the married part of the rustic wedding invitations wasn’t the focus of her collection.

Now I was curious.

As it turned out she was contemplating making them as a side thing. We both work random odd jobs for some extra cash. And the idea was to make her collection and sell that.

After a quick fact check. I learned that plenty of people actually create their own rustic country wedding invitations. Sites have contemplated the task and put together different thoughts on the subject. As you can imagine many are opinionated, and focused on the aspects that they like about the theme. But you can get a clearer idea if you look around and see what people actually like, that is where marketplaces like Amazon offer a place for handmade cards. So it wasn’t that outlandish. And it actually didn’t have to do with my rustic wedding. In the end sort of made sense again.

She had been looking through the popular options to see what they had in common. What worked for people and what didn’t. There are a lot of intricacies when it comes to creating handmade wedding invitations. This was all new to me.

What I realized after we got done talking about her idea to create her own line of wedding invitations was that she had put a lot of time and effort into getting things right.

Learning the right way to style them was important to her and I will say that it was really fascinating hearing her describe her plans.

How to tell if you have been invited to a hipster wedding is one of those social survival skills that will keep you from looking like an idiot when you show up. This handy info graphic will lead you through the steps to tell if your wedding, or the wedding of a friend is headed to hipsterville. Of course not all rustic weddings are hipster inspired.

The original infographic is originally from refinery29.com but I couldn’t find the page.

Though they’re trying to minimise it, the recent relocation of Melbourne Australia to the ocean east of Japan in Microsoft’s flagship mapping application is blamed on someone having flipped a sign in the latitude given for the city’s Wikipedia page.

This statement may or may not be the actual cause of the issue. One thing is certain though, it does produce a question about accuracy on other areas of the map.

As unfortunate as this is it won’t deter me from using the service in the future.

The emerging Capitol Hill fashion combo of the man bun hairstyle topped with a micro-fedora successfully unites the best of contemporary styles in hair and hats for young men. This autumn, expect to see the new look showing up in trendier spots all over the Hill.

Alright, you got me. I played Pokemon Go like there was no tomorrow for about a day. I have something like a hundred and twenty pokemon since my last count. But those days are over. I actually broke out the GBA and Saphire just for the prosperity of it.

Now there is a new game on the market, and it comes out of Belgium.

A Belgian primary school headmaster has developed an online game for people to search for books instead of cartoon monsters, attracting tens of thousands of players in weeks. Players post pictures and hints about where they have hidden a book and others go to hunt them down. Once someone has finished reading a book, they “release” it back into the wild.

“While I was arranging my library, I realized I didn’t have enough space for all my books. Having played Pokemon Go with my kids, I had the idea of releasing the books into nature,” Gregoire told Reuters.

Though it was only set up a few weeks ago, more than 40,000 people are already signed up to Gregoire’s Facebook group.

A SpaceX Dragon capsule that helped prepare the International Space Station for future commercial astronaut flights has returned to Earth after a stay of more than month-long mission. A robotic arm released the unmanned capsule packed with 3,000 pounds of cargo at 6:11 a.m. EDT, then fired thrusters several times to move a safe distance away from the station orbiting about 250 miles up. The departure began a less than six-hour journey that culminated in a Pacific Ocean splashdown at 11:47 a.m. EDT, about 300 miles southwest of Baja, California. The Dragon launched from Cape Canaveral early July 18 on a Falcon 9 rocket and berthed at the station two days later. Among the cargo brought back from space Friday were a dozen mice from a Japanese science experiment — the first brought home alive in a Dragon. Samples from mice euthanized as part of an experiment by pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly also were on board. Results were returned from an experiment that studied the behavior of heart cells in microgravity, and from research into the composition of microbes in the human digestive system, NASA said. Findings from both could help keep astronauts healthy during deep space exploration missions.

But SpaceX hopes to kick off Labor Day Weekend early next Saturday (September 3rd) with a Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

This is a big deal if you have been following SpaceX news in recent months.

The search for better/cheaper methods of distilling water or generating steam has been ever on going. Now researchers from MIT and the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, led by George Ni, describe a prototype design that boils water under ambient sunlight.

Central to their floating solar device is a “selective absorber”—a material that both absorbs the solar portion of the electromagnetic spectrum well and emits little back as infrared heat energy. For this, the researchers turn to a blue-black commercial coating commonly used in solar photovoltaic panels. The rest of the puzzle involves further minimizing heat loss from that absorber, either through convection of the air above it or conduction of heat into the water below the floating prototype.

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But it’s probably not a last. The researchers used computer modeling to look for factors they could optimize, and they calculated that the device should make steam even at about half of direct sunlight’s full intensity. With that much wiggle room, they say that a cheaper, less effective absorber material could bring the cost down even more. The current design should only cost about $6 per square meter to make, and the researchers think they could reduce that to $2 per square meter. At that price, they estimate you could produce steam for about five percent of the cost of a system that has to concentrate sunlight.

There have been rumors about HAARP since news broke about a year of two ago that people thought it was used in some sort of mind control array or whatever. Well it s now under new management.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks now owns and operates the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program and invites the public to an open house Saturday. This is interested visitors’ chance to learn about the scientific mission and research at the Gakona facility, which was transferred last year from the U.S. Air Force to UAF.

HAARP’s original purpose was to analyze the ionosphere and investigate the potential for developing ionospheric enhancement technology for radio communications and surveillance. But now that the University of Alaska Fairbanks has taken control of the station they intend to make the facilities available for researchers on a pay-per-use basis.

If I actually lived in Alaska (yeah, I know it’s big, let’s say Gakona) I would have considered spending my day there. The reason? They are holding an open to the public to an open house. This is gives interested visitors’ a chance to learn about the Gakona facility.

For nerdy Gakona residents this your chance to see the station for yourself. A chance I am betting doesn’t happen all that often.

“We hope that people will be able to see the actual science of it,” said Sue Mitchell, spokesperson for UAF’s Geophysical Institute, which operates the facility. “We hope to show people that it is not capable of mind control and not capable of weather control and all the other things it’s been accused of.”

Researchers at Princeton announced at Hot Chips this week their 25-core Piton Processor. The processor was designed specifically to increase data center efficiency with novel architecture features enabling over 8,000 of these processors to be connected together to build a system with over 200,000 cores. Fabricated on IBM’s 32nm process and with over 460 million transistors, Piton is one of the largest and most complex academic processors every built. The Princeton team has opened their design up and released all of the chip source code, tests, and infrastructure as open source in the OpenPiton project, enabling others to build scalable, manycore processors with potentially thousands of cores.